reframing femininity
I am done proving me. My life is not one prolonged job interview, a permanent Olympic trial, an ongoing all-state music audition. I am not a college application for admissions officials to peruse, an employee scrutinized for business acumen or her annual performance review, an associate striving to make partner. I refuse to be
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Everywhere I turn, there is nothing. Vast nothingness all around me. As far as my eye can see is emptiness. Dry, arid, dusty, flat and desolate nothingness. My heart is broken into a million pieces. Shattered into dust on the ground. It’s hard to distinguish between the dust of my broken heart and the dust…
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Sadly, the body of Christ has often failed to see trauma as a place of service…I think a look at suffering humanity would lead to the realization that trauma is perhaps the greatest mission field of the twenty-first century. (Diane Landberg, 2015, Suffering and the Heart of God, p. 8) Almost eleven years have passed…
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She peers over the edge of her handlebars, wondering at the hill ahead. Can she go down it with eyes closed? Can she hold her breath long enough to make it to the bottom? Wind in her hair as she unstraps the helmet, dangling it below the bars, she grips the rubber under her little…
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Dreams awaiting daylight. I have so many. Planted in the secret, quiet confines of a tender heart. But how do you dream anew after years of hopes unanswered? After giving your all and coming so close but it not being quite enough? How do you dare ask for the impossible, when you’re battered and bruised?…
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“Why do you say you have no one?” Stare. “What makes you feel no one understands?” Stare. “Can you make a box in your mind and fit the stories inside?” Stare. Blank. I stared. Thoughts echoed inside but I didn’t dare say them out-loud.
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I stood in the spotlight, strumming the first four chords I’d ever learned on guitar over and over and over again. I couldn’t remember the first note of the song. I’d been playing guitar for over ten years, having played in front of people hundreds of times. A minute went by. Another minute passed and no notes came. One…
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Money was tight. I mean tight. There wasn’t any extra, not a lick. We had stepped out in faith to build the house. THE house. This was the house we would stay in forever. This was the house our children would move out of and our grandchildren would run into. We had been working and…
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“Elephants,” I thought. “No, it was a whale.” I read about her a few months ago. Her sweet baby had died and she glided through the ocean with a small body on her back, unable to let go. Her whole pod surrounded her as she carried her lifeless child for 17 days. I like to think that…
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One of the sessions I attended at a recent conference was about resilience and optimism. The presenter said it was once believed that resilience was an inherited quality, but we now know that resiliency skills can be taught. As she spoke, different life events came to mind, some I had not thought of for many…
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